


Strange Attractors

by raedbard



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Community: kink_bingo, Facials, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-14
Updated: 2010-04-14
Packaged: 2017-10-08 22:53:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/80333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He is thirty-two years old and he's acting like a teenager with a crush on their math teacher. Fortunately for Sam the dynamics of any given group of people engaged in a political campaign in winter in New Hampshire are profoundly chaotic. Particularly if C.J. Cregg is involved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strange Attractors

**Author's Note:**

> For kink_bingo 09's amnesty period. Kink in question is 'facials'.
> 
> (I should apologise at this point for how little I know about quantum mechanics given the influence it seems to have had on the themes. I like the concepts, but I probably don't understand them! Just pretend that it's like Sam trying to get the name of the supercollider right, okay? *hides*)

1.

The dominant thought in Sam's head right now is: fuck, it's cold in here. It's November. November in New Hampshire. November in New Hampshire during a snow storm, and the Bartlet for America HQ is a draughty building with faulty heating and at least one window taped up with green garbage bags instead of the more usual fitted double-glazed glass. The rustle of the bags billowing and sagging as the wind blows into them is distracting, getting in between Sam's thoughts and preventing him from being easily able to connect one to another. He's trying to write a speech, and it's not going well.

He is sitting on a cardboard box in a corner of the HQ that no one comes into very often (they don't like the cold anymore than Sam does, presumably), and his feet are dangling a few inches from the floor. He lost sensation in his toes about an hour ago, he thinks, but he keeps butting his heels up against the box anyway, hoping, absently, that this is enough friction to at least stop them freezing off all together. He's employing a similar kind of plan for his fingers -- tapping the basic rhythm section of 'Blackbird' out on the side of the box (because, according to Josh, wearing gloves inside makes him look impossibly sissy to the Governor) and humming the rest of the song under his breath. He is not happy, for reasons that have everything and nothing to do with the weather, but he's hoping that he's doing a decent job of faking it. He figured McCartney might help him out with that, though he wouldn't be surprised, wouldn't be surprised at all if Toby Ziegler came up behind him and said --

"Beatles?"

Sam jumps. Between the rustling of the makeshift window, the effort of remembering exactly how a song he's known since he was five years old sounds in the middle, and the present turn of his thoughts on this damn speech, he didn't hear him coming. Though, really, he kinda suspects the guy of having a stealth setting that he doesn't tell anyone about. Sam presses his hands down firmly on his thighs, hoping that this will at least stop his fingers shaking. He turns around, to his left, meets the eyes of his interruptor, then states the obvious:

"Toby."

"Really, Sam, the Beatles? I had you down as more of an America kind of -- "

Sam decides that honesty disguised as sarcasm is his best option here: "It's all part of an elaborate ploy to make me seem innocent and trustworthy," he says as evenly as he can. "And happy."

Toby, who is smiling that dim quarter-smile that is more in his eyes than on his mouth, looks from the sight of Sam's tightly clasped hands to the shiver of his feet still banging into the cardboard box to the general surroundings of cold, wind and a dark corner, and then _blinks_. Sam has never known anyone who could invest a simple blink with as much meaning as Toby Ziegler can.

He looks back up at Sam, nods slightly and says, "Yeah, it's really working."

2.

The other problem, beside the cold and the speech and the Governor banging around the place like he's a tiger they stole from a travelling circus for god knows what reason, Sam says to himself, the _other_ problem, is that you're miserable.

He's aware -- he's told Lisa on the phone enough times in justification of his rapid exit from their life in New York -- that this should be the job of his life. It ought to _be_ his life. And it is, sorta. In the sense that he goes to bed every night with the cadences of the Governor's speech ringing around his head and that, instead of reading a book to wind down before sleep, he worries about polling numbers and answers given at Town Hall meetings and the likelihood that those answers will bring them an ass-kicking at a later date. And then he gets woken up at 3AM by a phone call from Josh, or the crazy, oxygen-deprived part of Josh's brain that comes up with the best schemes and also feels the need to share them with Sam at ass o'clock in the morning.

All of which is exhilarating and -- Sam's sure of this part -- absolutely not a waste of a life. But that hasn't stopped him looking over his shoulder the whole time and _worrying_. About the case notes he's sure he left in his desk at Gage Whitney and which therefore couldn't matter less except as evidence that he's losing his grip on reality. About the fact that he has spent whole meetings looking around at the other people in the room, tallying up the IQ points and finding himself coming up devastatingly short until he is so scared to say anything at all that he ends up talking himself into just saying the first thing that comes into his head which looks vaguely like a good idea and getting greeted by the special look the Governor keeps on stand-by for the very stupidest things his staff come up with. The thing is, they aren't bad ideas (well, some of them are, but not every single one) its just that he can't sell them because he's too nervous of everyone else.

Josh would tell him to just relax -- you went, he would say, to Princeton and Duke, you're a first class mind in a body that just tends to fall over a little. Just relax. Say what you think. You do have valuable things to contribute.

Actually, Sam's pretty sure that if he said anything to Josh about this inferiority complex thing he'd just laugh and try to get Sam drunk at the first opportunity that offered itself in order that he could be laughed at by even more people all in a room together. Which might be why he hasn't confided in his oldest friend yet.

The rest of them, then? Well, Leo is a great guy but not someone that Sam is immediately sure would be up for a man-to-man talk about personal inadequacy and how that might impact on a Presidential campaign. Lisa would just tell him to get his ass back to New York. C.J. kinda frightens him, what with the fact that she has three inches of height on him when she's wearing her heels and the whole irrepressible confidence thing.

Which only leaves Toby. Sure, yeah, there's Ginger and Cathy and Donna Moss, Steve the Fixer, maybe even the Governor if you could get him to stop yelling long enough to open up a conversation. But all those people have jobs and things to do that do not involve babysitting Sam through the first important job of his life, and anyway, he's kinda scared of all of them as well. So, mostly, it's Toby.

Which is another thing. Because Toby is also kind of the problem.

3.

Sam didn't meet Toby Ziegler the first day. Or not until the very end of the first day. Since the night is currently very long indeed and so is Sam's to-do list, he decides that he is allowed to reminisce, with his eyes closed, curled up behind the rackety old desk in back of the HQ.

*

" ... And this is C.J. Cregg," Josh says, throwing an arm in the direction of a tall woman who is looking at Sam over the rims of her glasses like she's met guys like him before and never been impressed with them. "She falls in pools a lot."

"Joshua!"

"And also scolds us."

"You need it."

"And also does some things related to talking on television and fielding dumb questions from reporters. Or she will if anyone ever decides they'd like to _ask_ us any stupid questions."

Sam tries to grin in a _sorry about him_ kind of way. "Um, hi."

"I really suggest, Sam," C.J. says, sticking out her hand and shaking Sam's vigorously, "That you spend as little time with Josh as possible. I've discovered, over the course of the two weeks that I've known him, that he tends to be a bad influence on people."

"I'm leaving now," Josh says, "So you'll just have to sermonize for someone else's benefit, C.J."

"I am," she calls, to Josh's back as he walks away. "For this poor young man!"

"Too late," Sam says.

"Oh, don't tell me -- "

"He's an old friend. I've had, I don't know, about ten years of it now. I'm probably a lost cause."

"Tell me that you do not periodically drink yourself into the kind of stupor that means you just _have_ to walk around with someone else's underpants on your head?"

"No, that I don't do. Does -- "

"Not often. Every now and then," C.J. says, "Okay, just once. But, as you can imagine, it made an impression."

"Yes," Sam says, with feeling.

"You're a lawyer, right?"

"Right."

"Then you must be the exception that proves the rule. The rule of drunkenness and boxer shorts, I mean."

"I'm a writer also."

"Then that must be it." She reaches out for his hand and pulls him in from the doorway where he has been dumbly standing since Josh wandered off. "Come on."

*

"So," she says, once she's shown him his desk and his pile of boxes and his ruler and his stapler and, rather more importantly, let him into the open secret of where all the coffee stores are kept, "If you're a writer, then really you'll belong to Toby."

All Sam manages is: "Err -- "

"You think I'm using the word 'belong' loosely, don't you?"

"No?"

She shakes her head. "Not really. Sorry, Sam."

"Okay," Sam says, holding his hands up in surrender and in the process almost knocking over his brand new cup of not particularly good coffee, "This is a thing, isn't it? A prank? You're making him out to be an ogre and some kind of slave-driver because it's ... "

He trails off; she has been shaking her head slowly, and, he thinks, wincing a little.

"Ginger!" C.J. yells this through the open door in the direction of a blonde girl whose name Sam vaguely remembers having been told about an hour ago. "Come in here for a minute?"

Ginger comes in, with a stack of papers in her hands on top of which is balanced what looks to Sam like a Danish pastry, and stands in the doorway with an expression which is a politer version of the _what the hell do you want?_ one which Sam has seen quite a lot of the interns wearing.

"Ginger, would you tell Sam all about Toby and what he's like as a boss, please? Impartial third party as you are."

As soon as Ginger says, "He's not hiding behind the boxes is he?" Sam gets the idea.

*

So that day he stays late, because he knows he'll never get any sleep if he goes back to the vile hotel he's booked into with visions of this fairytale monster of a boss he's apparently earned himself and anyway, isn't it in all respects more manly to stay and face up to your fears?

He's been sitting here an hour. It's dark outside and virtually everyone else has gone home. He thinks C.J. is still around somewhere but Josh left hours ago, looking harassed and important; leaving Sam feeling a little like he's just been shipwrecked. He has drunk all the coffee he thinks is wise given that his hands are already shaking (from the New Hampshire-in-November cold or from all out terror he isn't sure) and the only sustenance left within his reach is an apple. He is biting into this, wondering if he's actually been this plain dumbly scared since he was in grade school and looking forward to the next day's beating every night in his bed, when he hears the front door crash open and then slam shut.

What Sam is expecting is an ogre, an all-out fairytale giant with raging eyes and popping muscles, probably a shaggy beard but definitely an impression of general, indisputable manly hirsuteness, maybe a ferocious dog that is probably actually a wolf. What he gets is:

A tired-faced man of slightly less than his own height with snow in his dark beard and what is left of his hair. Whose flyaway wrists emerge from his jacket sleeves as he throws his arms out this way and that catch white in Sam's eyes. Whose own eyes are a deep brown that looks black under the poor lighting of the HQ and even blacker in the split-second picture Sam's memory takes of them as they take in their new deputy. He looks like quiet pretending to be brash, like sad pretending not to care, like someone who has gone a long time without a win.

"Who are you?" he asks, in a soft voice like snow melting in Sam's palm, and Sam knows he's done for.

4.

Sam wakes up with a start. There is no light in the room but the muted, enthusiastic effort of his battered desk lamp. The snow is banked up against the window, making this light a little strange -- too much like dawn in the middle of the night. There was a crash, Sam thinks, or a door slamming. Or was that what he was dreaming about?

No, it's the back door slamming. The draught is pervasive, reaching Sam at his desk and numbing his feet and calves under the ramshackle table (two boxes each side of a plyboard surface and Sam's continued prayer that nothing with break, crack, splinter or otherwise cause him bodily harm). By contrast, the left side of his face is being slow roasted by the efforts of the 60 watt bulb in the desk lamp. Sam fingers his cheek gently, testing for lamp burn, but can't feel anything on account of his fingers being too cold to appreciate sensation.

Hot and cold, Sam thinks, that's kinda the way it goes these days. At least the life of a miserable lawyer comprised days of relative peace along with the sense of purposelessness and moral bankruptcy. They are currently in the middle of a cold spell: unexpectedly down in the polls with the Governor's black mood showing no signs of imminent abatement; Leo firing someone every day until Josh worries to Sam over the HQ's supply of horrible coffee whether they will have any staff left by Super Tuesday; C.J. making cheap jokes too loud because she's running the same three worries around her head like demented marbles; Josh's nervous energy eating up the oxygen in every room he stands in; and Toby. Toby blustering through the place, as loud and frightening as a tornado on the horizon, making Sam think in endless spirals and count under his breath (_one, two, three, four_) every time he sees his boss appear in a doorway, trying to work out how far off the next breath of thunder is. Toby is angry, simmering with it, endlessly restless; he makes Sam think of a tall black cloud that shifts with the surges of his temper, always threatening to envelop everything in his path. Sam half expects spots of rain to appear on his sleeve as soon as Toby opens his mouth to start shouting.

It hasn't been a good week. And Sam pretty ashamed of himself, since he has mostly spent it not trying to help these people who are apparently his friends, not trying to solve their problems or at least try to give them some comfort. He hasn't even written a decent sentence for over a week. Instead he has been thinking about the silhouette that Toby makes in his head; the little cartwheels Sam's stomach performs when he lets himself remember small truths like the hollow of his boss's throat, or the way his jacket stretches over his back.

Which is pretty stupid. Pretty shameful. He is thirty-two years old and here he is, a dumb, lovestruck kid with a crush on his boss, against the background of a good man's run for President.

And now the damn door won't even stay shut. He can hear it clearly now -- the sound of metal banging inside brick, three or four rooms away. And it's cold and he's pissed and scared and feeling like he might want to do violence to something, just to prove some point about not being anyone's damn lapdog. And in the absence of any better candidates, the door will do just fine.

Sam storms through the intervening rooms, wondering vaguely how he's going to make this door stay closed. Is there a broom handle nearby he can wedge the thing with? Can he get one of the vending machines over there and make a barricade?

"Jesus Christ, Seaborn, it's just a door, not the Confederate Army," he mutters as he gets close.

Outside the snow is still coming down and the smell of winter is flooding in, making Sam's sinuses groan ever so slightly but also performing the useful function of really really waking him up. In which improved state of consciousness he decides he probably ought to check outside the door before he makes the thing completely impenetrable, just to see if there are any obscure New Hampshire fire regulations he might have overlooked.

He opens the door and watches his breath appear in the night sky. He hears a cough and a deep, satisfied intake of breath, and then smells -- along with the crisp November air -- cigar smoke.

"Hello, Sam."

"Err."

"Were you planning on locking me out?"

"Ahh -- "

"It's fine -- I can go round to the other door, it's just that if I smoke out there, I'm told, it creates a bad impression of the campaign. I told C.J. I'd only drink the finest whiskey out of a brown paper bag but she wasn't buying it. As a look."

"Toby."

Toby stares at him, smiling slightly, like he's amused by a joke only he knows the punchline of. "Hi."

He has been standing there, blowing smoke rings, while Sam worries about polling numbers and the fact that he appears to have regressed into some other guy's adolescence. He has been there the whole time. Sam opens his mouth to say something that would probably turn out to be some variation on 'This is so typical of you!' which would in turn only serve to make him sound even more like Toby's bitter ex-girlfriend, or, worse, the fifteen year old with a crush on her math teacher. He shuts his mouth again.

"Can I come in?"

Sam stares in his turn. He can't make any words that sound even fifty per cent reasonable come into his head and therefore does not trust himself even to open his mouth. He nods, once, swings the door open, and lets Toby slip inside.

He has on the huge black overcoat which makes his shoulders look twice their usual breadth and a scarf of a muddy green colour. There are tiny flakes of snow melting on these, as well as in his beard and the curls of his hair. Sam's eyes find a single flake to concentrate on and stare until it is gone, disappearing into the glossy darkness of Toby's hair. There is a little voice in his head saying _we've been here before_ but Sam isn't listening to it; he can't listen to it. Not yet.

"You understand that it's past midnight, right?"

"I still remember how to tell time, Toby."

He grins -- slow, almost mocking but for the suggestion of something else -- something still sad -- in his eyes. "So you've decided to move in."

"I had work to do."

"Uh huh."

Sam sighs. "I fell asleep."

Toby smiles. "Yeah."

He's walking towards his own office now, and Sam is trying to keep up. He walks surprisingly fast for a guy with no discernible athleticism and in his wake Sam is overpowered with the smell of those cigars, the snow, and him. It's either love, smoke, or his hormones but it is definitely harder to breathe now that he is sharing the HQ building with Toby.

"We need to get you a better hotel," Toby says over his shoulder.

"Huh?"

"A hotel. One that doesn't make you believe that sleeping here is the better alternative. Unless, of course, you're trying to earn some credit for dedication and selflessness?"

"It was originally part of the action plan."

"But you got sleepy?"

"Yes."

"O-kay."

"So how come you're here?"

"I couldn't sleep."

"Ah," Sam says, "Irony," and instantly hates himself.

Toby looks over his shoulder at Sam again, just for a second. And at first Sam thinks it's the same expression Toby always uses at these moments -- the one which made Sam hate himself in the first place -- but it seems softer around the edges, as though the exasperation is thawing into grudging affection. Possibly. He turns around and Sam stares at the back of his head, trying not to get distracted by the tight curls of his hair spilling over his collar, and ponders the question.

"A little like irony," Toby says, reaching the door of his office and flicking the light switch. "But really more like a job that won't quit." He holds the door open for Sam as he goes to his desk and rummages around in the papers. "See, the thing is, I'm convinced we're going to win and I will spend the next four years of my life not getting any sleep. Although now that I've said that we will, of course, choke and die in the very next poll. That I didn't care enough about that eventuality to stop myself saying that sentence is probably proof that I do, indeed, need to get more sleep. Or any sleep at all."

Sam stands in the doorway, not quite realising that he's grinning like an idiot. "I didn't know you were superstitious."

"I'm not," Toby says, turning around and looking vaguely affronted with a file open in his hand.

"Toby, I think you'll find that the last thing you said could have been construed as superstitious."

"Only technically. These things are complicated, Sam, you can't fool with this stuff."

"Toby, are you really suggesting that any combination of words you may or may not say concerning the outcome of the election will actually influence said outcome?"

"Do you always talk like this? Have you been drinking too much coffee again, Sam?"

"Come on, Toby, you don't really believe all that stuff?"

Toby gives him the 'I am older, wiser, and better at this job than you, Sam Seaborn' look and picks up another file and stuffs it in his briefcase, also forgotten by the side of the desk.

"Just don't say anything about the thing in front of anyone except me, okay?"

"If I say in front of you it doesn't count then?"

"I've changed my mind: just don't say anything. Ever. Be silent. Be silent and respectful and stand where I tell you to stand."

"Toby."

He raises his eyebrows. "It's good advice, Sam."

"I really think it only sounds that way to you, Toby."

"You could ask around, but I think you'll find everyone agrees with me."

"Is that so?"

"Yes, I've trained them to answer yes whenever I raise my inflection to indicate that I'm seeking an opinion."

"So you only ever ask them questions that you want to hear affirmative answers to?"

"No, I never ask them any questions at all because they haven't learnt the rules yet, and their opinions are worthless in any case."

"Despite you bullying them."

"Not _bullying_ \-- "

"I was briefed on this, Toby, I know the score."

He halts, one hand in the air. Sam watches him as he sways a little on the spot, averts his eyes and then brings them back to centre, training them on Sam like a sniper through his gun sights.

"I think 'bullying' is an undeserved spin."

"You're doing it for their own good, perhaps?"

"_My_ own good, and therefore theirs."

Sam laughs. "Yeah."

"C.J. wanted to scare you, you know."

"I figured."

"She enjoys scaring preppy whitebread kids, you see."

"I see."

"And she had you all worked out in a sixth of a second."

"You weren't even there."

"No," he says, picking up his stuff and making back towards the door. "But I was briefed too."

"I want to state for the record that it didn't work at all. The intimidation. I'm not scared."

Toby stares at him, again. His eyes narrow ever so slightly and he rocks, once, from his left foot back to his right. " ... Yeah."

Sam watches him out the door and despite the greater part of his attention being taken up with, again, the way Toby's clothes stretch over his back, manages to catch Toby's keys and lock the office up for him as he disappears in the direction of the front door.

"Toby!"

His voice echoes back through the corridors: "I'm not going anywhere. Though if you could move your ass that would be -- "

Sam runs and fetches up, breathless, at the glass and snowdrift facade of the HQ's front door beside which Toby is standing, leaning slightly on the lintel, managing to look bored, impatient, and amused all at once.

" -- Good. Okay."

"You're leaving?"

"I thought I might, yeah."

"But -- "

"Sam?"

"You said. You said you couldn't sleep."

"I'm not going to sleep."

He's out the door now, heading to an old Dodge that Sam already knows is his even though he gestures to it, vaguely, as if to let Sam in on that information.

"I -- "

"You're going to entertain me, or else bore me back to sleep, by telling me all about whatever it was you were doing. And if it works I'm gonna distill you and sell the essence as an over-the-counter remedy for insomnia. I see no reason not to make a cheap buck out of you, since I'm pretty sure you have more of them than me."

Sam laughs -- a great gulp of snow-filled air. He can't help it. He really has to get a lot better at lying in the fifteen seconds he has before he will be required to get into that car with the man on whom he has his first crush for fifteen years, because if he doesn't he really fears for what he might end up saying. But he can't help the laugh: it's being chosen, it is being _noticed_ at all; and who cares if Toby is -- as Sam is almost completely sure he is -- playing some kind of hideously Machiavellian game with him (and by extension his stupid, fragile heart)? He gets hours, secret, private hours of his own, with this guy. His heart is singing.

"So get in the damn car?" Toby says, watching Sam as he stands by the curb, laughing like a doped-up freshman.

Sam smiles. Nods. "Okay."

5.

Toby's hotel is higher up the salubriousness scale than Sam's, but not by much. The doorman gives Toby the same look as the interns at HQ and slinks away behind his desk, looking like he's trying to disappear. Toby ignores him and heads for the elevator banks but Sam realises he's giving the guy the same look he gives Ginger whenever she's been on the wrong end of Toby's temper. It seems to help about the same amount.

Toby sighs all the way up (level 12) in the elevator and he won't look at Sam. It's like he's forgotten Sam is standing next to him, trying to remain perfectly still so that he doesn't disturb any of the molecules in the air by doing so much as turning his head. The biggest sigh comes when the elevator dings and the doors open. Sam stands there, watching him, still feeling invisible. Until Toby turns round and beckons, impatiently.

"Sam!"

And Sam hustles, on command, to heel. C.J. wasn't kidding.

It's a short walk from the elevator bank to Toby's door, but long enough for Sam to realise just how nervous he is at this point. He stands beside Toby as he fiddles with door keys and holds his briefcase still between his ankles, and thinks about things he can say at this point which will mean he gets to go home and to sleep in the bed he's paying half his take-home for instead of going on this big, scary adventure. Before he's thought of anything, Toby has the door open and one hand on Sam's shoulder, pushing him through.

"There's whiskey on the side," Toby says. "Drink some. I need to wash up."

*

There is a _lot_ of whiskey on the side, it turns out.

Ordinarily Sam doesn't drink whiskey. It seems, despite his being thirty-two years old, still a little two grown-up; his drinking habits were almost entirely conceived and put into practice in college, where beer that had been flown in from other countries was really as adventurous as it got, and he hasn't had any reason to change those habits. Until now, of course. Toby drinks beer, and plenty of other things, but he drinks whiskey like a kid drinks milk. Sam half expects him to start dipping Oreos in the stuff. Yet he never seems drunk, or not in any way Sam has ever seen someone drunk.

Instead of revealing what was hidden, the alcohol just intensifies what is already there. Toby's speech becomes slower and his pauses more pregnant. He smokes more. And he stares longer at Sam, into his eyes and down at his mouth. His little smiles twinkle, like he _knows_, like he's daring Sam to guess what is going on in his head and like he knows damn well what is going on in Sam's.

It is, to put it mildly, very disconcerting.

Eventually it's simpler just to come straight out with it. The alcohol helps, but Sam's drunken calculations of the risk versus payoff versus mortification and the need to run away to sea and change his name insist that there is a definite bias in favour of just fucking asking what the hell is going on. So he does.

"Toby, I ... This is ... great, actually, but I have to ask you: what the hell am I doing here?"

"I figured you might enjoy it."

"I ... er. I am, I suppose, but that's not -- "

"A ringing endorsement, Mister Seaborn."

"Toby."

"It's part of C.J.'s plan to make me happy. She doesn't understand about, well, anything, really. But continues to insist that she cares about my happiness. Or simulacrum thereof."

"And, er, I fit in -- "

"She suggested that ... well, the exact word she used was 'crush' but we don't have to talk about that. In fact, we're _not_ talking about that."

"She said ... She said, _what_?"

"It's okay, Sam. This _is_ a major political campaign. This is its trail. Or will be once we start actually moving. These things happen."

Sam opens his mouth. No sound comes out.

"I'm enjoying this whole thing where you lose the power of speech, Sam. I think we should work on this."

"Toby!"

"Yes?" he says, with a look of completely reasonable normality on his face, like Sam's about to ask him what his favourite blend of coffee is.

"Are you saying ... are you saying. Is what I think you're saying actually ... ? And what the hell is C.J. doing even as any part of this conversation?"

"I told you: she claims to care about my happiness."

"Your happiness?"

"Yes."

Sam splutters: "Toby, I -- "

"She's open-minded."

"Yes," Sam says, with feeling.

"And she prefers to imagine that male happiness revolves around sex. And how much of it said males are getting."

"O-kay."

"Ask your question," Toby says, not smiling even a little bit, no matter how hard Sam stares at him. Though he thinks, possibly, that the whiskey is throwing him off a little.

"What question?"

"The question I know is bothering you right now. Because you're, you know, _you_."

"Toby, you've known me two months!"

He raises his eyebrows. "It's been enough time, Sam, really. Ask the question."

"Okay: you're married."

"That's not a question."

"I don't need to ask in the form of a question because I already know that this information is true and how that makes me feel, Toby!"

"How does it make you feel, Sam?"

His voice has turned very quiet, like these are words he doesn't use often; a register of his voice that hardly ever appears without the application of alcohol, darkness, and someone else's need. It ought to feel manipulative -- it ought to wind coldly around Sam's honest, stupid, youthful love for him. But it doesn't. He sounds as sad as he does anything else. His eyes have changed; the planes and angles of his lids and eyebrows; he looks sad too.

Sam looks at him, then down at his own hands. He imagines that his face looks wretched, but he can't make himself shake the expression off.

"Not good."

"Not good?"

"No."

"You wanna ... expand?"

"Toby -- " Sam stops. He sighs. "I ... There's nothing to say, Toby."

"Sam?"

"What?"

"Come over here."

"Toby, c'mon, I -- "

"Just, come over here."

Toby kisses the same way he gives those quiet orders, the ones which are impossible to disobey. It is a negotiation done silently, with an incline of his head and an expression that says nothing discrete that Sam can distinguish but which, it seems, hardly needs to.

Sam feels helpless. So he just closes his eyes.

Toby kisses with his hands occupied, one around a glass and the other on his own thigh rather than Sam's. They aren't there yet; there doesn't need to be that kind of tenderness yet.

His mouth is full of thunder too, Sam finds out. All the storms that have kept him awake these last month of nights, there are all there on the edges of his lips, between his teeth. He kisses by degrees, like he's forming an argument; like this is another form of rhetoric, to get Sam on his side. Sam doesn't need the persuasion, no matter what he has failed to say about Toby's wedding ring. Sam opens his own mouth for the lesson without protest, like the eager kid in the first row of the class.

Sam scrabbles at Toby's shirt buttons, expecting a tie that Toby isn't wearing. The buttons are small, fiddly, and Sam's fingers are clumsy from lust and whiskey. He gets the shirt open while Toby breaks the kiss and is rubbing his chin over Sam's cheek, with his mouth still wet and his breathing heavy. Sam shoves his hands inside the shirt just to clutch at Toby's skin, pull at his hair. His chest is thick, mountainous. Sam finds that he is fascinated by kneading this flesh in his hands: he holds on to Toby's shoulders underneath the shirt, pushes the heels of his hands into the warmth of his armpits. Sam wonders, in the part of his head that isn't overdosing on his own hormones, whether this is all some bizarre extension of the original prank -- whether C.J. is going to pop up in Toby's kitchen with a Polaroid camera and some cheap champagne. Catch out the new guy by throwing him to the sexually predatory lion. But Toby is gasping in little puffs as Sam starts to kiss his throat and pull at his shirt to expose his nipples. And Sam doesn't think Toby is that good an actor, despite the creeping certainty that Toby is imagining -- with his eyes tightly shut -- someone completely other than Sam.

It does at least feel kind when he pushes Sam's head down. He strokes Sam's hair first. He suggests, but the suggestion is the kind that doesn't expect to be refused. One hand on Sam's shoulder and the other on the crown of his head. Sam finds himself nuzzling Toby's thigh with his eyes closed, then opening his mouth around the shape of Toby's erection, through his pants. Then it's Toby's hands pushing his head away so that belt buckle and zipper can be attended to, and then the heels of Toby's hands pushing down his underwear, then Sam closes his eyes.

It's uncomfortable, giving only the second blowjob of his life with a crick in his neck and Toby's hands pressing down on his shoulders, pulling him forward and down at the same time, and too damn close to off the couch altogether. So he gets on his knees.

Toby has gone silent. Though Sam is holding them down tight he has no need to because Toby's hips have stiffened as though paralysed. Sam pulls off Toby's pants, his boxers, pushes the tails of his shirt out of the way. Toby's cock curves to the right a little, Sam notices, dazed by the ease with which he is learning these things he never thought he would know. The hair that follows the curve of Toby's belly is darker than the curls on his head and in this low light, as dawn breaks, looks truly black. Sam buries his face there for a few moments, licking hot skin and thick hair, enjoying the half-choke pressure of Toby's erection straining against his throat.

"Sam ... "

"Okay," Sam says, "One second."

His hands are in Sam's hair again. This time it is more like an apology; for what Sam is not sure. He looks up, over the crest of Toby's belly and chest, trying to catch his eye. Toby is staring -- gazing -- at him, like he is fifteen too, getting his cock sucked for the first time by some stupid beautiful boy he thought would never look at him. Sam wonders, until pain makes him stop, if Toby's face would look that way if it was a woman between his thighs now. Sam has seen him charm the women in the office, smile at them and look into their eyes just a moment too long. He has watched this tactic work. He hasn't seen it used on a man, yet the closest thing to the expression on Toby's face for most of tonight has been that wry, dark knowledge of his own ability to influence and suggest; the hint of sexuality, the answer that always seems to be a 'yes'.

Now he just looks tired, staring at Sam like he has no idea who he is or what the hell they're doing here.

"Toby -- "

"Don't ... Just shut up."

Because he says it gently, wearily, Sam does. He closes his eyes again and brushes his cheek across Toby's dick, rests his hands on Toby's thighs, and opens his mouth.

It's only his second time, he's had no practice, only knows what he likes himself, and yet it all seems to come easily. He doesn't gag, nor is it difficult to open his mouth wide enough to accommodate Toby's cock. He gets a weird kind of pleasure from ducking down between Toby's thighs, having his hair fall into his eyes, losing the light in his peripheral vision as Toby's hands come up to hold his head in place and rock him, gently, up and down.

Toby's breathing seems to set the pace: slow, an adagio in tiny sighs and tender moans that Sam tries to remember, tries to make into a melody he might be able to play in the morning, as he feels his own awareness of what is going on here retreat to a resigned kind of bewilderment. He isn't trying to work out anything now except what will make Toby come, and what he can take for himself, for later; little secrets for nights less confusing and more straightforwardly lonely than this one.

Sam lets Toby's dick slip out of his mouth and pushes his face back into the warmth of Toby's belly, nipping the skin with his teeth and pinching the white flesh on the inside of Toby's thighs between his fingers. Sam wants as much of this as he can: he would like to taste every part of him, create alchemical reactions by rubbing his own skin against every different place on this body, trust that he won't ever forget this tumbling rush of sensation. Toby's cock gets crushed in the struggle, up against Sam's collarbone and the corner of his jaw, and Toby gasps.

Sam looks up at him. Toby's head is thrown right back against the couch and there is a red sweat over his chest. His fingers are clenched. He doesn't look like he's really there: off someplace else, where his mind is quieter and he can get some sleep. Sam kisses down his left inside thigh, to the knee, and puts his closed mouth against the hardness of Toby's kneecap. He feels as if he could press hard enough to break through the flesh, and that if he could do that he would have some understanding of why one body should make so much difference to him: why he will go down on his own knees for it. Sam presses his cheek against inside thigh, against warm belly, then rubs his cheek against Toby's cock.

"Toby -- " he whispers. "Come, come now."

It doesn't happen right away. He's too far away. Sam holds Toby's cock loosely at the base, rubs the head over his lips, over the stubble on his chin, in strokes over his cheeks, throws his head back and presses it across his neck, rubs it there. Toby moans and takes hold of Sam's shoulders, tight, fingers biting, and thrusts his hips up and up, pushing his cock over Sam's cheek. Then, he comes. Sam closes his eyes. Toby comes in long spurts, over Sam's eyes, into his hair, across his cheek. It drips onto his collarbone, hot and acrid. Sam opens his mouth and his eyes at the same time and Toby moans with what sounds like pain and shoves between Sam's lips, giving one more pulse, on Sam's tongue. He tastes bitter, because of the smoke and the whiskey, and just as Sam expected. Sam pushes Toby's thighs apart and holds his cock in his mouth, sucking gently now, and breaking off to nuzzle and kiss, and hold Toby's balls in his mouth, listening to Toby's breathing go from frantic to exhausted to sleepy, holding him around the waist, holding on tight.

Eventually Toby pushes him away, half-heartedly, and Sam swallows and pulls the back of his hand over his mouth, then wanders into the kitchen for a glass of water without looking over his shoulder.

When he comes back he can't look at Toby's face. He hasn't come himself even though he is painfully hard in his jeans; it just hasn't occurred to him. He's thinking about how he'll get back to his own hotel from here, and whether he'll be able to stand having to look at Toby tomorrow morning, whether he should just pack up and go back to New York now.

"Sam."

Sam looks up, reluctantly. Toby has pulled his shirt off completely, and though his pants are re-zippered his belt is hanging loose at his waist. He is standing by the couch, looking reassuringly awkward and incredibly tired. His eyelids are drooping every few seconds, until he pushes them open again with the effort of a big blink. Sam smiles, because he apparently can't help it, and because this is probably the most vulnerable he has ever seen Toby Ziegler, including the last twenty minutes.

"Bed," Toby says. "Come on." He holds out his hand in Sam's direction and waves his fingers around impatiently.

"I thought ... I mean, it's a big couch."

Toby shakes his head. "It's a big bed."

"I was gonna -- "

"You need sleep. _More_ sleep anyway. Come on."

He says the last two words in his command voice and Sam is halfway to the door without thinking.

"But, Toby -- "

"Just _shut up_, and come to bed."

He is a stupidly, impossibly warm thing to sleep beside, Sam discovers. Under the covers with him it is warm enough that Sam almost forgets the persistent ache of his erection, until it brushes up against Toby's thigh. Sam groans involuntarily and Toby looks at him, half exasperation and half affection, and starts to jerk him off. Sam pushes his head into Toby's shoulder, gets his hair stroked, and thinks about sleeping. He comes quietly and messily, and Toby brushes the hair off his forehead and gestures towards the bedside table. "Tissues," he says, then yawns.

Toby turns his back as soon as the light is off but he doesn't make any sound or movement when Sam puts a tentative hand to his neck and strokes, lightly, the curls and the sweep of shoulders. Sam touches him for a while, testing the textures with his fingertips and his knuckles and the backs of his hands, but the warmth is enough to send him to sleep within minutes, with his head jammed up against Toby's shoulders and one hand on his hip. His sleep is comfortable, and dreamless.

6.

They are both late in to work the following morning. Sam catches C.J. grinning at them while they are both, bleary-eyed and covered in snow, groping for the coffee pot. And that is the point at which he gives up trying to be in charge of his own destiny.

Toby's wife calls him around midday. Sam makes himself scarce and does not see Toby for the rest of the day. He manages to work. He even manages to write a few sentences that deserve the name. He tries to not think about anything except the work and, for a while, this works.

He wakes up, at midnight, in his little corner of the HQ, having fallen asleep at his desk, with the top sheet of his legal pad stuck to his cheek. Toby is standing in the doorway.

"Hey," Sam says, stopping his inflection rising into a question just in time. Toby's expression -- the one which makes Sam think dissolving him in a puddle of acid is only one of the ways Toby is considering solving the continuing problem of his own staff -- is giving him a minor existential crisis. Maybe Toby would prefer re-enacting some of Schrödinger's better known experiments on him; maybe he's already started: Sam already has problems understanding the nature of his existence, or at least the nature of his existence on this campaign, but the feeling disappears when Toby gives him that look.

"Hey."

"It's late." Sam peels the sheet of paper off the pad, looks at the scribble thereupon, and then throws it away. "I think my sleep cycle is broken."

Toby chuckles. "No kidding."

"What do you know about Schrödinger?"

"That kind of conversation is really kinda dangerous at this time of night, Sam."

"Really? It's the only time it makes any sense to me. How about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?"

"You're just running through things you heard about while flicking past the SciFi channel now. I'll tactfully refrain from asking how much liquor you've had."

"I studied this stuff, Toby! I could have been a physicist!"

"But you're here with me instead. Come on," he says, coming into the room to switch of desk lamp and stuff papers into Sam's briefcase. He holds Sam's coat open and, dumbly, Sam gets up and steps into it. "Atta boy," Toby says.

"Where are we going?"

"Just come on. Let's go."

Sam can feel a pattern beginning; something that will last, he hopes, at least as long as Jed Bartlet's presidency.


End file.
